The Fuckest Uppest

These are the things I like enough to get them permanently on my body:

My first tattoo:

I wanted it since I was like 15 and carried around a picture of it with me until I was almost 19, when I finally got it. Harry Potter has meant a great deal to me throughout my life. It is the reason I’m a reader and the reason I’m a writer. It has brought me wisdom, comfort, and understanding.

My second tattoo:

I got it in November 2007, shortly after my cat Max passed away from cancer. I raised Max since he was a teeny baby and he was only seven when he died. He was my baby. He got sick on Friday, I rushed him to the emergency room, and he died Sunday. We didn’t find out what killed him until Monday, he was so sick that he died before they could even diagnose him.

It was the worst weekend of my life and it was the end of the worst year of my life. My parents separated, I had a total nervous breakdown, and I failed out of school as a result. Then my cat died. At the time I just really needed a way to remember him, to memorialize him, and to help me get over his death. So I got a tattoo and a kitten.

My third tattoo:

I planned it for a while and when I met Andrew McMahon after my Something Corporate show last summer I asked him to write “swim” for me so that I could get it tattooed. He wrote it for me, asterisk and everything, and gave me a massive hug. 

It’s “swim” in Andrew McMahon’s handwriting. 

It’s a reminder for me to always keep going, no matter how hard things get. I need that reminder sometimes.

It’s extra special too because Michelle has a swim tattoo as well. We didn’t get them together, but I still feel like it’s another thing that bonds us.

My fourth tattoo:

This is easily my most meaningful tattoo because I got it with the person I love most in the whole world. I don’t get to see my best friend very often because she lives in England and uh hello I live in Atlanta but when she came to visit me for a week we went to get tattoos together. We originally were each going to get two different things but then we decided we wanted to get matching ones and Brendon Urie’s cover of Three Little Birds has meant a lot to us over the past year when we’ve been going through so much together. No one but Michelle will ever fully understand what this tattoo means to me and that’s how it should be.

My fifth tattoo:

This is a lyric from fun.’s “Benson Hedges”. The full lyric is: “now I received a call from my family and what they’d started to say brought me home: they think I’m beautiful for all my big mistakes”. 

It’s a reminder to myself that the people who really matter - my friends and my family and a few of those people in a particular - love me despite the mistakes I’ve made and maybe even because of those mistakes.

My sixth tattoo:

Athena is a badass lady and so am I.